The Rescuers

I’ve been pondering a category of show that sits somewhere at the intersection between the law enforcement procedural, the spy procedural, and the action/adventure.  I’ll call it the “Rescuer.”  It’s about a person or group of people who are very good at protecting and rescuing others, and every week they do some rescuing and/or protecting.  There’s a good bit of philosophical overlap between Rescuers and Robin-Hood shows like Leverage, but I think they’re slightly different.  Rescuers not only involve problem-solving and aid-providing, but also require a rescuee in imminent physical peril.  MacGyver (new and old).  Strike Back.  Transporter: the Series.  The A-Team.  Human Target. 

I often really like Rescuers.  The Rescuer comes with a built-in engrossing premise that combines high stakes with dramatic successes.  Of course, like all categories, it can be done well or poorly, but just as the law enforcement procedural comforts us that law can defeat evil in an hour, the rescuer tells us that brave heroes can do the same.  It’s hard to beat that feeling, when it works.

 

It would be easy to observe the extent to which these stories are gendered:  the manly hero using physicality to protect the damsel in distress.  And most of the time, they are, even when the distressed damsel is capable in her own right, or when women are part of the rescue team.  (And increasingly, both are true.)  So instead, I want to spend a moment on how xenophobic they can be.  A lot of Rescuers veer into the international adventure/espionage world, and they pin the evil on a dangerous stranger driven by inscrutable cultural, nationalistic, or extremist motives.  The wholesome American rescuers save the wholesome American victim from a shadowy Other.  I fear these contribute to a general sense that Americans are more heroic, braver, more justice-minded and reasonable than outsiders.  And that’s not a lesson I want to propagate in these global times.

Here are a few Rescuers from the last year:

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (CBS, new Spring 2016.  Law Enforcement Procedural.)

Watched: A few episodes

Premise: Profilers bring back Americans who’ve been kidnapped in other countries.

Promise:  This show is into its second season, so clearly it has no shortage of commercial potential.  It’s a solid CBS show, and clearly CBS has found a formula that works for capturing a broad cross-section of audience.  For my part, I like the show’s problem-solving procedural elements (I’m still watching its sibling, Criminal Minds) but it trades Criminal Minds’ “woman in peril” problem for a “foreigners are different” problem that I find harder to get past.   But I do like the cast, especially Annie Funke as the team’s medical expert.  It’s good to see a woman of substance included unremarkably in a team of rescuers.

Verdict:  okay, but not my favorite.

Ransom (CBS, new.  Private Investigator Procedural.)

Watched: most episodes

Premise:  Professional negotiator and his team rescue kidnap and hostage victims.

Promise:  This is one of those shows where a preternaturally confident dude, who’s kind of a jerk to everyone, saves people with his confidence and skills.  I have a whole entry brewing in my head about this variety of hero, who would be unbearable in real life but is supposed to play as charming on television.  On one hand, this one stays just barely on the good side of the charming/unbearable line.  On the other hand, but main skill seems to be knowing when to call people’s bluff, which is supposed to look like skill but all too often looks like luck.  The other characters are exceedingly good at supporting him and intuiting what he wants, but everything about them is so connected to him that it’s hard to get emotionally attached.  This would all be fine if the procedural elements were gripping enough to make us keep coming back, but overall the whole show entertains without gripping, making it good background television but not appointment television.  It’s eminently watchable, but doesn’t have a lot of surprises. 

 

Verdict:  Would do fine in a summer season, but not enough oomph for Spring.

Six (History Channel, new.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched: season

Premise:  The lives and missions of a Navy Seal team after a former member is captured

Promise:  This show is what I imagine Strike Back would be if it took itself seriously instead of being a fantasy.  Six takes itself very, very seriously.  It’s all bravery and machismo and emotional unavailability.  The show’s women exist to be saved and supported, even when their actions are heroic and brave.  They are inconvenient obligations, making demands that detract from the men’s true duty to some abstract notion of country.  When our hero starts to lose his humanity, is it his wife’s fault for becoming increasingly distant? The show may think so.  In a way, it’s a parable about toxic masculinity, but it lacks the introspection to be critical about its heroes or their brand of patriotism, both of which it embraces without a lot of debate.  I’m not saying the show shies away from thought-provoking debate—at its heart is a thoughtful condemnation of the polarizing effect of militarizing foreign relations—but it also embraces abstract notions of American military right and outsider risk.  That said, it manages to tell a good yarn all the way to the end, and it has more nuance than it would need to do that.

Verdict:  I just wish the show were more self-aware.

The Blacklist: Redemption (NBC, new.  Spy procedural.)

Watched: season so far

Premise: A group of covert operatives-for-hire carry out spy and rescue operations

Promise:  This would be a really great cable show, but it’s a little out of place on network television.  It rides the fun train of spy-action shows more than we expect from network, but it has much the same appeal as other pulp action heist shows, and it’s a highly-watchable banter procedural.  Its characters are charismatic and ambiguous enough to make us care and wonder about them.  I don’t love the show’s version of motherhood, which turns an otherwise ruthless spy into a desperate softie.  But that’s a quibble.

Verdict:  A show that would thrive somewhere else, but doesn’t quite belong where it is.

Taken (NBC, new.  Action/adventure.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise:  the origin story of an intelligence operative whose specialty is rescues

Promise: OH HIS MANPAIN.  Here we have a man whose sister dies, leading him to build and use his “particular set of skills” to save others.  But is his particular set of skills really that particular, or skills for that matter?  He’s good at gritty-voiced declarations of what people will do, and he is correct about what they will do because he’s got a gun pointed a their knee, but it’s not clear to me how “particular” that gritty-voiced gun-pointing skill really is.  Or how admirable.  Also problematic is the show’s overall treatment of women as kind-hearted, compassionate, weakness machines.  “My advice, don’t ever have kids.  Especially not a daughter,” a character says, embracing the show’s essential premise that loving and protecting women compromises the strength of otherwise strong men.  But I could look past that and enjoy the adventure, if I wanted to get to know the character or his adventures better.  Instead, I find his growling and laconic need for action and revenge to be boring.

Verdict:  Doesn’t work for me.

In the hopper:  I think next we’ll talk about some law shows.  Maybe.

In Dreams

A few shows lately have taken as their premise the existence of dreamlike mental powers with effects on the real world. I’m interpreting this broadly, but there is a sense in which all of these concern the power of dreams to define and control reality, and although the shows are quite different from each other, they share a similar trust in the magical potential of dreams.  In some of them (Beyond, Falling Water), characters have the ability to manipulate a persistent dream-world, which in turn gives them special powers in the real world.  In some of them (Cleverman, Channel Zero, Legion), characters have telekinetic powers that allow the things they invent and imagine to manifest in the real world.  In one (Westworld), the persistent dreamlike memories of androids allow them to transcend their programming.  Each is a bit of a bewilderer, some more than others, but each comes back for grounding to some idea of a world that’s real, and a world that isn’t, or at least not quite so.

Each of these shows that excels does so despite its high concept, not because of it.  The concepts provide interesting platforms, but that’s all those platforms can do. The shows that work hover above those platforms rather than resting on them.  Each is a story about how love can make someone exceed limits—the limits of physics, of technology, of reality, of their own troubled pasts.  The shows don’t work nearly as well when they get too impressed with their own concepts.  The puzzle boxes of Westworld and Falling Water too often water down characters’ passion and triumph with the writers’ brain-teasers, making us stare at their shows’ shiny objects rather than sharing their characters’ struggles or listening to their hearts.

I’m not sure why all of these shows are happening now.  It’s not like we’ve never seen similar concepts—I’m sure we can all reel off a few off the top off our heads—but it’s in the particular zeitgeist right now.  Whatever the reason, there’s something comforting about the idea that imagination—something we learn to do in our earliest developmental stages—can make us better.  I want to believe that’s true.  Imagination fuels innovation, art, the ability to define oneself.  So the idea that this thing that we all have innately can allow us to transcend our predicted boundaries, and can make us better, can allow underdogs to triumph …that feels good.  Perhaps that’s why, although all of these shows are fantasies, they work best when they don’t feel quite so fantastic.

Cleverman (Sundance, Summer 2016.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: season

Premise:  In an Australia where Neandertal-esque aboriginals are imprisoned in a special “zone,” an unsuspecting mixed-race young man inherits the powers of their spiritual leader.

Promise:  The production story of this show is particularly interesting:  it was originally commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Indigenous department, and it has an 80% indigenous cast.  It has gone out of its way to hire indigenous inters for crew jobs, and the storyline is very intentionally aimed at tackling Australia’s colonial history and the persistent issues of colonialism and race that plague Australia, New Zealand, and the US (the three producing countries).  So although the pilot was really unpromising, but I went out of my way to give this show more of a chance.  I’m glad I did, because it improved considerably.  I felt more attached to its themes than its individual characters, many of whom seemed archetypal rather than personal, but its themes were moving, and there was a lot of good to be found in its individual story of a young man finding his power and maturity while embracing his heritage, and in the cultural story of a people refusing to be relegated.

Verdict:  I’m planning to tune in for the second season.

Westworld (HBO, Fall 2016.  Science Fiction Drama.)

Watched: Season

Premise: Sentience gradually dawns on the android performers in a Western-themed park.

Promise: This is one of those Quality Television shows that one is supposed to love, and it’s undeniably gorgeous and well-acted.  But as well done as many things about it are—I watched the whole season—my chief reactions are critical rather than admiring.  I hate to be one of those people who cries “overrated!” but I suppose that’s what I’m doing, here.  So buckle up for what may turn out to be a bit of a rant.

I appreciate the show’s exploration on the rise of sentience and the nature of thought and humanity.  As with many shows of its type, the androids often show more so-called humanity than the humans, who manifest their basest impulses when placed in a world without consequences.  I appreciate the show’s desire to explore what actual consequences might look like for overdogs.  I respect the show’s observation of the moment in which the worshipper identifies the fallibilities of its god.  But I rebel against the show’s messages, largely because the show’s beliefs seem at best hollow, and at worst cynical.  Its questions about the relationship between humanity and sentience feel too shallow, too recursively exploitative, too self-satisfied.  For those questions to really work, we’d need to care about the characters, and there are only a few we are able to care about.  Instead, we focus on the puzzle.  Puzzles are fun to solve, but lack emotional depth.

A while back, I had a conversation with a friend who’s a fan of the show, and I expressed my misgivings as a matter of intersectionality.  He retorted, accurately, that the show’s most interesting characters are women and people of color.  But…I’m not convinced that solves the problem.  This is a show whose coercion isn’t universal, whose cruelty lands disproportionately on the non-normative.  Throughout the show, those same interesting women and people of color are stripped of their agency, objectified literally and figuratively, made toys and puzzle-boxes rather than whole people, for the use, enjoyment, satisfaction, and fascination of an overwhelmingly normative straight, cis, male gaze.  And to the extent that’s being done by the story and couched as unjust, I’m fine with it.  Stories about injustice need to show the injustice.  But it’s not only the story that does it.  It’s also the production itself, which seems to want us to stare and figure rather than care and think.  Fundamentally, the show embraces the very inhumanity it decries, parading titillation and violence before its viewers.  It does its own violence without ill consequence, objectifying characters and getting awards for it.  Its normativity undermines the profundity:  where are the gay bachelor parties?  Where are the people experimenting with gender identity?  And where are the people who really, truly, want to be kind? 

Verdict:  As eye-candy, solvable puzzle, and occasional provoking of thought, it’s very nice.  But for a show about the meaning of sentience, I recommend the infinitely more empathetic HUMANS.

Channel Zero: Candle Cove (SyFy, Fall 2016.  Horror.)

Watched: Season

Premise: A man returns to his hometown to understand what happened to his twin brother and other children who were killed there when they were kids.  This is an anthology show, so future seasons will have different premises.

Promise:  This show was genuinely spooky and compelling.  Its deliberative pace seemed affected at times, but added to the atmosphere, allowing us time to consider the difference between truth and delusion, the emotional weight of the characters’ struggles, and the extent of its horror.  It’s not a violent or bloody show; instead, it explores how wrong psychological harm can go, and its bleed-through between imagination and reality allows its characters to experience extremes of fear and heroism they had not known they were capable of. 

Verdict:  Good stuff.

Falling Water (USA, Fall 2016.  Supernatural Drama.)

Watched: Season

Premise:  Several individuals experience an interconnected dream and wrestle with a conspiracy that puts a child at risk.

Promise:  Each character strives after someone with whom they cannot communicate—a son, a girlfriend, a mother—and a conspiracy whirls around them that neither they, nor the viewer, understand.  This one walks the line between action drama and bewilderer, and for that reason it never quite succeeds at either.  Its puzzle box verges on the incomprehensible, and never quite lands in one place long to make figuring it out seem emotionally imperative.  So we’re left not really knowing who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, and not really caring that much. 

Verdict:  Its non-linear puzzle-box storytelling piqued my curiosity, but if it had come along at a busier time, I would have deleted most of it instead of watching, and I found its resolution (such as it was) unsatisfying.

Beyond (Freeform, new.  Supernatural drama)

Watched: season

Premise:  Young man wakes from a 12-year coma into the middle of a conspiracy surrounding him and the dream-world he inhabited while he was comatose.

Promise:   This show was kind of all over the place, but it had some touches that surprised and kept the show effective despite what could seem like a too-standard reluctant-hero beginning.  The show doles out information slow enough to keep viewers wondering, almost too slow.  Even at the end of the first season there are things we don’t know.  But the world is fleshed out enough that we suspect those things exist.  I’m also pleased by the humanity and depth of the show’s characters—even the relatively minor ones—whose motives are complicated and who are seldom just one thing. 

Verdict:  Not appointment television, but better than I expected.

Legion (FX, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: Season so far

Premise: The trippy, unreliable experiences of an extremely powerful, schizophrenic mutant in the X-Men mythology.

Promise:  Be warned, this show becomes more of a bewilderer as it goes on, not less of one.  But it’s excellent on nearly every level, even in the sense of disorientation it imposes on the viewer.  I had misgivings about Dan Stevens in the lead role, but he does well, as does Rachel Keller.  Aubrey Plaza hits it out of the park as a mixed-gender friend who resides in his mind.  The production design is stunning in its multi-era/era-less contribution to the show’s dream-like atmosphere.  I do wish the show gave us more reliable emotional background on the characters sooner, because it takes too much time for our emotional engagement to kick in, but even so, it’s not just a puzzle-box:  It’s a box for which one may willingly welcome insolubility.  It’s both a portrait of mental illness and a meditation on the relationship between mind and body:  nearly every major character has some sort of dramatic dissociation between their mind and body (body switching, body sharing, exploration of others’ memories, mind sharing…), with the power and horror that accompanies those breaks from expectation.  The result is psychedelic, touching, often fascinating, and occasionally moving.    But the show floats atop its emotion, and I wish it didn’t.  It has the potential to make us really feel, and it falls just short of that.

Verdict:  High quality, and for the most part, also excellent.

In the hopper:  Many!  I think I may be chipping away at the backlog, but I’m not positive.

Too Easy

Because TV is recreation that interrupts the routine comfort of our lives and living rooms for regular visits, it has to walk a line between “too easy” and “too difficult.”  I’m not using “difficult” here to mean gritty.  Sure, violence and swearing and sex and other “adult” content can make something harder to watch.  But those things can also cover up for a show’s relative ease, allowing the show to pretend it’s all grown up when really it’s predictable simpleminded.

So what do I mean?  A show has to be interesting enough that it’s worth the interruption, but no so hard to watch that it feels like work.  It has to have enough emotional resonance that it makes us feel something, but not so much that it makes us hurt  without hope.  But what makes those things true?  What makes something easy without being too easy, and hard without being too hard? 

Of course a lot of this is personal preference, and variable preference at that.  Some days I want to know what’s going to happen before it comes.  Other days I want to be surprised.  Some days I want to sit there while warm fuzzies wash over me.  Other days, I want to watch something challenging or thought-provoking.  Some days I want to be told that life is manageable.  Other days I want to watch people make difficult decisions in a complicated world.  Some days I want to know that everything will turn out ok.  Other days I want to wonder whether that’s true.

Here are a few shows (all from 2016) for those “easy” days—some merely comfortable, some downright too-easy.  I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that there won’t be second seasons of the two I found watchable, and not of the two I didn’t.  Perhaps the people who really want easy TV want it even easier than I do.

Thirteen (BBC America, UK show, new to U.S Summer 2016.  Drama.)

Watched: series

Premise: Young woman escapes from captivity 13 years after being kidnapped.

Promise: You would think that a show about the aftermath of the kidnapping of a young woman would be hard to watch.  And—I can’t believe there have been enough of these that it’s possible to say this—we’ve become accustomed to twists and turns and secrets and lies in aftermath-of-kidnapping stories.  See, for example, The Family (ABC) and Missing (Starz).  This show hints at those, but it is is surprisingly straightforward and easy to watch, considering the difficult subject matter.  It becomes a meditation on trust and trustworthiness, confinement and freedom, and a story of personal strength.

Verdict:  A solid 5 episodes.  (There won’t be a second season.)

Roadies (HBO, Summer 2016.  Drama.)

Watched: Series 

Premise: The complex backstage ecosystem of a touring rock band.

Promise: This was a Cameron Crowe production, with all of the Cameron Crowe romanticism and  sweetness and emotional button-pressing.  This is a show about the beauty of chosen family, which is wonderful, but it comes in such an unchallenging package that it’s hard for the chosen family’s triumph to feel entirely triumphant.  We don’t have villains here, not really, just trying circumstances that we know will be overcome.  It’s a fantasy:  everyone’s acting, not being, but a few shining moments of authenticity and humanity make us nostalgic for something we’ve never really known.  This is a show about atmosphere as much as story or character, and that atmosphere is pretty comfy.

Verdict:  Like drinking cream soda: sweet, empty calories. (There won’t be a second season.)

                          

Chesapeake Shores (Hallmark, Summer 2016.  Drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  The lives and loves of a family in coastal Maryland after the big-city sister returns home.

Promise:  This show is fundamentally a romance, grounded in a charmed world where everyone has enough, the world is untroubled, sadness is temporary, and everything will be fine if everyone just does what they’re meant to do.  Men are builders and lawyers and soldiers.  Women are writers and innkeepers.  Handsome songwriters follow their dreams and love their dogs.  Parents put their children first.  Indeed, the one career woman—an investment banker—is facing no end of trouble for not putting her family first.  But that’s ok, there’s a dog-loving songwriter for her to fall in love with.  What, oh what, will become of them?  And I can’t shake the feeling that shows like this are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Verdict:  The show’s wholesomeness is refreshing, but it’s straight-up boring.  I found it genuinely difficult to get through a whole episode.

This is Us (NBC, Fall 2016. Drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  Follows multiple eras (birth, childhood, current-day adulthood) in the lives of three siblings born on the same day, two biological twins and one adopted.

Promise:  I have such incendiary anger about some elements of this show that I can’t find perspective on anything else about it.  In my defense, I looked for things to like, and didn’t find them.  Aside from the angering parts, it all just floated by without really creating any challenge or surprise.  So let’s settle on what makes me angry.  This is a show for which the description of one female character is “Rebecca strives to be a better mother to her children, and has issues with [her husband’s] alcoholism….Rebecca always wanted to be a singer, but gave up on her dreams in order to focus on her family” and the description of the other female character is “She is obese and struggles with issues of self-esteem that she greatly attributes to her estranged mother. Kate's relationship with her mother led to depression and eventually led to her taking Prozac, which she needed to stop taking due to the weight gain.  Kate decides that in order to lose weight she needs to join a support group. Kate, despite attempting to not get involved with anyone until she can get her weight problems under control….” So, yeah.  Women should give up their dreams to be mothers, and when they’re not good at that, they’ll give their children depression, which will make their children obese, which is a problem that needs to be fixed. 

Verdict:  This show would be too easy to watch, if it weren’t so angering.  But apparently some people like it.  NBC has renewed it for two (?!) more seasons.

In the hopper:  Still more from 2016 than 2017, and still working my way through both!